Do you think the pixel is the only unit of measurement for building graphical displays? Come on, you can measure better than that! This article offers tips for user-friendly HTML layout and interface design, and explains why pixels aren't always the best unit for the job.

It is also a platform for commercial entities who must create emotions with the help of sophisticated graphical presentations. Just providing a text feature list and a photo in a corner is just not enough.

If your website looks bad in my browser, it will create negative emotions and you can forget your commerce. Simple as that. Ditto, if it does not work in Firefox. Unless I really need to use it, I will not both trying to find out why it does not render correctly. So much for "commercial entities and fixed layouts".

As for "photo in the corner", more often than not I see web sites having more "sophisticated graphical presentations" than information. It's the latter why I browse the web. If I want to see pretty pictures, I'll go to deviantart. If I want to buy something, find out something, I want content. Black on white provides as much content as dark gray on an image trying to look as a sheet paper.

[rant]
If web site owner really cared for "graphical presentations" and perfect looks, they would make sure the adverisments displayed would be in sync with the rest of the site's design.
[/rant]

If web site owner really cared for "graphical presentations" and perfect looks, they would make sure the adverisments displayed would be in sync with the rest of the site's design.

The point of adverts is that you READ them. The only way to make you take notice of them is by looking different from the rest of the website. As studies have shown in the past, the human brain can learn quick how to differentiate between "uninteresting" and "interesting" graphical elements on a website.

The only solution to circumvent the self-learning "advert blocker" in our head is to make banners stand out as much as possible. A minority of people will get frustrated if a banner takes away too much attention. Those people are unlikely to buy from you. (I consider myself part of that group.) For the majority of people, however, annoying banners do work quite well according to marketing studies.